About Me

I am Fred Richards. I have a B.S. ('85) in Physics (Magna
Cum Laude) from Northeastern University in Boston,
Massachusetts; I have a an M.S. ('86) and a Ph.D. ('91) in
Physics from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign,
Illinois. I was a postdoctoral research fellow at the
National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) in
Urbana, Illinois, and then a postdoctoral research fellow
at the Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) in Washington, DC.

As an undergraduate at Northeastern I worked as a co-op
student at AT&T Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, New
Jersey, for several years. There I learned about the Unix
operating system, working on a real-time variant,
developing hardware drivers. As a graduate student at the
University of Illinois I studied complex chaotic systems
and developed simulation software on Unix systems from Sun
Microsystems. I also wrote applications on the NeXT operating
system. As a postdoc at NCSA I ported quantum Monte Carlo
simulation software written for the Cray YMP supercomputer
to the the massively parallel Connection Machine CM-2
computer.

After leaving NRL I joined Entropic Research Laboratory,
Inc. in Washington, DC (acquired by Microsoft in 2002).
There I worked as a Unix/C programmer and became the
project development manager for Entropic's TrueTalk
text-to-speech software product. I ultimately became the
Engineering Manager for the Washington, DC, office, where
I oversaw a team developers responsible for much of
Entropic's commercial software product line.

I have been working independently since 1998. For a
sampling of some of the work I have done, please refer to
the Projects page of this site.